NASA's previous administrator championed a lunar base as a prerequisite for a manned Mars mission -- if only to prove that we could send a crew up for an extend

NASA's previous administrator championed a lunar base as a prerequisite for a manned Mars mission -- if only to prove that we could send a crew up for an extended period of time without resupply. I never understood this reasoning. We have plenty of ways to engineer and simulate these conditions on Earth (like the MARS-500, recently completed -- tl;dr, it's not fun, but they didn't dismember and eat one another). The only reason to stop en route to your destination is to refuel. This allows a larger spacecraft to be launched with a smaller rocket (of course you need more rockets to launch the fuel). http://www.nss.org/articles/depots.html http://www.nss.org/articles/depots.html